(34) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“The world is not what I think, but what I live; I am open to the world, I undeniably communicate with it, yet I do not possess it—it is inexhaustible.
There are not, on one side, things, and on the other, a consciousness that perceives them; there is a kind of common fabric in which both objects and subject are caught.
Perception is not a science of the world; it is not even an act, a deliberate taking of a position. It is the ground upon which all acts stand out, and it is presupposed by them.
The world is not an object whose law of constitution I hold within myself; it is the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only the ‘inner man’; or rather, there is no inner man: man is in the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself.
When I return to myself from the dogmatism of common sense or from the dogmatism of science, I find not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject given over to the world.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Notebook of Nounours

Now then, my little ones, here is something a bit more subtle. When one begins to pay attention to those invisible glasses I was speaking about earlier…
— We do not see…
— Exactly… a way of seeing the world… with invisible glasses… well… one begins to notice that one could wear others.
— How so?
— For example, instead of saying “there is a thing,” one could say: “something is happening.” Do you see the difference?
— No…
— In the first case, the world is made of objects. In the second, it is made of events. And suddenly, it is no longer quite the same world. So, an implicit ontology is this: a way of seeing what exists, which we use without thinking, but which influences everything we say and understand. And perhaps becoming attentive is not only about learning new things.
— What is it then?
— It is also, as little as that may seem, beginning to see the invisible glasses we have always been wearing.
— But… more concretely… what would be the difference between saying “there are things” and “something is happening”?
— Saying “there are things”… is to suppose a world already cut up, laid out before you. Saying “something is happening” is already to bring back movement… then there could appear… a kind of emergence… And the gesture goes even further: there is no longer, on one side, what is, and on the other, the one who sees. There is a common field, a kind of fabric… made of interwoven threads. In other words, even the “invisible glasses” are not simply placed on the eyes of an observer… they are part of the world itself.
— So we would have to… change glasses!?
— Becoming attentive is not only about changing glasses. It is beginning to feel that seeing is never neutral, that to see is already to be caught in a certain way in which the world comes to be.
— We do not really know the difference between the verbs “to come” and “to happen”…
— There is, between “to come” and “to happen,” a difference that at first seems minimal, just a prefix, and yet it engages two radically different ways of thinking what occurs.
To come is the simplest movement, perhaps the oldest. Something comes, or someone comes. There is an origin, even if vague, and a path. It implies a movement in space or in time, but a movement that can still be followed. One can almost always ask: where does it come from? And often, some answer is possible, even approximate.
What comes may be expected… may have been called, or at least prepared. Even when it surprises, it remains within the order of what could, in some way, have been foreseen. The verb keeps a certain familiarity: it belongs to the world of things that circulate, of beings that move… in short, of events that take place within a continuity.
To happen, on the other hand… is something else entirely…
In “to happen,” there is not only a direction, but a kind of arrival into being. What happens does not merely come… it comes into being, it occurs as an event.
And this is where the difference truly appears… what happens cannot be simply traced back to a clear origin. It is not something that travels toward us; it is something that emerges within the order of the real, something that begins to exist as event.
— One could say… what comes moves within the world… and… what happens makes a world as it appears.
— Exactly… in “to come,” there is still continuity…
— Yes… and in “to happen,” there is a break…
— When a person comes, they enter a space that is already there. But when something happens—a meeting, a word… that event transforms that very space. Afterwards, nothing is quite the same. It is not simply something added… it is a reconfiguration. That is why “to happen” is deeply linked to the idea of event in the strong sense. Not just a fact among others, but something that marks a before and an after. An event that happens was not simply waiting somewhere; it was not there as such. It becomes what it is by happening.
We touch here something almost vertiginous… what happens does not merely come to us…
— What does it do?
— It reaches us… and sometimes even constitutes us.
One does not come out unchanged from what happens. That is also why one says: it happened to me. The form indicates an essential passivity. Where “to come” can be active (I come), “to happen” is often what occurs to us without us being its origin or its master.
Something happens, and in happening, it happens to us… in the strong sense… it touches us… or transforms us.
— If we understand correctly… “to come” would belong to movement… and “to happen” to emergence.
— That’s it… “to come” still presupposes a stable world in which things circulate. “To happen” names the moment when something opens the world otherwise.